Businesses worldwide recognize the commercial value of their data and seek reliable, cost-effective ways to protect the information stored on their computer networks while minimizing impact on productivity. Protecting information is often part of a routine process that is performed within an organization.
A company might back up critical computing systems such as databases, file servers, web servers, and so on as part of a daily, weekly, or monthly maintenance schedule. The company may similarly protect computing systems used by each of its employees, such as those used by an accounting department, marketing department, engineering department, and so forth.
Given the rapidly expanding volume of data under management, companies also continue to seek innovative techniques for managing data growth, in addition to protecting data. For instance, companies often implement migration techniques for moving data to lower cost storage over time and data reduction techniques for reducing redundant data, pruning lower priority data, etc.
Enterprises also increasingly view their stored data as a valuable asset. Along these lines, customers are looking for solutions that not only protect and manage, but also leverage their data. For instance, solutions providing data analysis capabilities, improved data presentation and access features, and the like, are in increasing demand.
As computers have become an integral part of business operations, many enterprises have come to rely on computer networks to store and backup their information. In addition, enterprises have come to rely on the ability to restore information quickly and efficiently when needed. In addition, enterprises are storing and backing up ever increasing amounts of data. Ensuring that the data can be searched and easily restored has become increasingly complex as the methods for storing and backing up data have become more sophisticated and the amount of data has increased significantly.
The increased amount of data that is backed up and stored places heavy demands on system resources. Because accessing data in secondary storage can be relatively slow and resource intensive, these demands can be especially burdensome when a user attempts to search through or restore secondary copies of production data. Likewise, users may spend significant amounts of time trying to find and retrieve the desired data.